


The Confession of a Reluctant King

by IamtheOther5am



Series: Throne of Glass ficlets [1]
Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M, Lots of pairings, Point of View
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 09:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9994751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamtheOther5am/pseuds/IamtheOther5am
Summary: Dorian Havilliard, crown prince and king of Adarlan, looks back on his life, love, and loss.





	

I don’t know if ever truly deserved love. I think my father had a lot to do with that. I never saw him show affection to my mother, never mind myself or my brother. We were just…there; a Queen, an heir, and a spare. 

Growing up I watched my father put his hands on any serving girl, any courtier he took a shine to, and I guess it rubbed off on me more than I cared to admit. I never intended on being the typical prince with the roving eye, mind you; I had always hoped to find that one girl…that one woman, who would love me and cherish me and allow me to offer the same to her.

But, I guess that was just the romantic imagination of the avid book reader talking.

So I became that person I hated. I truly became my father’s son, taking a different girl to my chambers every night, revelling in it, playing up to my reputation in this damned kingdom. I can’t pretend to have hated it entirely…I grew accustomed to them throwing themselves at me, pushing their jewel-adorned chests in my direction, offering themselves to me.

What red-blooded man would turn that kind of attention down?

Besides, my father, the King of Adarlan, seemed to show me much more respect when I tumbled down to breakfast with the faint red mark of a woman’s kiss on my collar, than when I had my nose buried in a book.

Oh, how he hated that I read. _Books are the weapons of idealists and the ruination of kingdoms_ , he used to tell me. I took to hiding them from him as best I could, sneaking down to the library at all hours of the night, usually after my latest conquest had fallen asleep, or gone home to her husband. Once, he caught me reading a book on the early history of Erilea; a history of its magic, of the fae, the witch kingdoms. The deep purple bruise he left on my cheek kept me away from the dinner table and my mother’s prying eyes for nearly a week.

Eventually, though, he stopped coming to see me in my room, when Perrington began to demand all of his attention. So I carried on bedding as many women as was deemed acceptable for a crown prince, foolishly trying to hold onto a shred of my father’s attention, whilst feeling so damn empty inside.

That is until Calaena Sardothien came into my life.

I couldn’t help myself. I tried to keep away, I tried to continue on the path I was already well on my way down, but there was _something_ about that girl that just…halted me in my tracks. The way she spoke to me, how she wasn’t afraid to say what she thought about _anything_. I found her spirit, her personality such a welcome breath of fresh air. I was hooked.

That was the first time, I realised, that I felt something powerful, something all-consuming in the presence of a woman. I loved her. I know, looking back, how foolish I was. She was an assassin, and I the future king of this gods-forsaken place. But she made me feel wanted and valued, even if only for a month or two. But deep down I knew she could never love me, and she said as much, eventually. 

I envied her. I would have to marry a girl I hated - or just about tolerated, at best – and settle down into the life laid out for me since before I was born. Calaena, meanwhile, would get out of that tasteless castle one day and walk the streets free and able to make her own path in life. I would be shackled behind a castle wall…tethered to a throne of glass.

So we parted ways. Then she fell for Chaol, and I… _heaven help me_ I was so jealous of my best friend, there were times when I felt like I could ring his neck for taking her from me. But what could I do? She made it clear that we could never be together. Our worlds were too different. That chance of happiness, so close, right up until the moment that it was ripped from my grasp.

I let her go, and gods help me, it hurt.

I stumbled upon my magic just as our paths began to deviate. I was alone. I kept it hidden, but after Nehemia’s death, after I had to use my fledgling power to keep Celaena from killing my best friend, I felt… _relief_.  A selfish kind of relief at not having to witness the woman who had rejected me sneaking around with my oldest friend.

But this magic. How could I have love _and_ magic? How could I when this power would consume me, ruin me? Who would want to help, in a world my father had conditioned to fear magic?

Sorscha answered those questions. Sorscha. _My_ Sorscha. That golden skin so beautiful and soft, dotted with freckles. Her brown eyes that looked beyond the prince who stood before her, covered in self-inflicted battle wounds, and saw the shy boy who just wanted to love and be loved.

I knew almost immediately that she had stolen my heart. I felt nervous every time I went to see her, every time my magic overpowered me and sent me down those steps to her door, every time she touched me to tend my wounds. She helped me learn to control my new power, and to see that maybe I _did_ deserve love, after all. What we had was tender, romantic, the purest kind of love.

We never consummated what we had, but, in some ways, it kept the light that shone around us brighter than I thought possible. I knew that one day we would take that step, and she would be my queen. My beautiful, glorious queen.

Death, though, would extinguish that bright light too soon. _Much_ too soon. My darling Sorscha, gone in the blink of an eye. And no matter what transpired, I will go to my own grave despising my father for what he did to her. I will never get the sounds of the night out of my mind.

It was all my fault, and that guilt will drag me to hell in the end, I know it will. But in the meantime, as my best friend declared me his true king, as my father sent the Wolf of the North to the dungeons, I watched, and I cried, and I screamed…and I raged. Ice and cold rained down on that room, alongside my screams. I was being punished for trying to have what everyone _should_ be allowed to have, but not me…I was truly undeserving of love, of happiness.

So when my father put that collar round my neck, a part of me hoped it would be my end. Out of instinct I tried to fight back, to keep my head above the black swirling nothingness that threatened to drown me, but my punishment, my imprisonment…it was too much.

The Valg began to pull me down, and all the while, above all conversations my mouth had with my courtiers, with my father, all I could hear was the sound of the sword on her neck. The taunting sound, reminding me what happens when I dare to love. When I came across my friends in the gardens, after they had rescued the Wolf - when the blonde-haired woman I knew I had once loved held my life in her hands - I prayed to whichever god might be listening to just take me. Let it be done. Put me out of this misery. But she didn’t. And the darkness grew thicker and heavier.

So much death, so much pleasure taken from it. If I had found the opportunity to take a knife to my own throat, I would’ve gladly spilled every last drop to be free of it all. I couldn’t bear to see through its black eyes and into that world where only pain and death mattered. The world where no one and nothing meant anything. Whatever my father’s true motivation - whether he was a victim himself or a willing leader - he gave me the perfect punishment.

The things that I did whilst imprisoned in my own body will haunt me until the end of my days. A small part of me wonders if anything that happened whilst the Valg controlled me was actually rooted within my own personality. Did I take pleasure in the torture and death of the rebels, of the Royal Guard? Of Ress and Brullo; men that I trained and laughed with. I pray that I had surrendered to the demon by that point. I can’t bear the thought of it any other way.

Then, just as I willingly began to sink beneath the depths of that dark, wretched place in acceptance of my fate, I found myself in a forest. I found myself being stalked towards by a woman, a _witch_. Eyes of burnt gold, hair whiter than the moon on its brightest night.

I found _you_ , Manon Blackbeak. When you uttered those two words, ‘hello, princeling’, and pushed aside the darkness inside me, I felt a shiver of glorious ice rush up my spine, awakening something I thought dead. Something good. I felt…hope. I felt a strange sort of peace. Even though my life was still in the hands of the evil lurking beneath my skin, the evil that seeped into me through that Wyrdstone collar, I felt it. Lust, love…whatever you want to call it, the root of something beautiful. You saved my life. You warned Calaena… _Aelin_ , and you saved me.

You might try to pass it off as payment for a life debt, but your actions, your selflessness gave me a second chance. And as I finally broke free of my walking prison, as I let my magic flow uninterrupted from my body, cleansing the earth, putting my father out of his misery, I told myself that one day I would find you, I would thank you, and I would kiss you.

I bear the scars of my torment, both physically around my neck, and mentally, deep inside me. I always will. But after I saw you again, that fateful night when Rifthold fell to Erawan, that root took hold, and began growing and growing, reaching across the sea, across the continent. 

And suddenly there you were, brought to me on the wings of the wind. Willing, wanting… And my love for you was set in stone.

It is a different kind of love - yours and mine. A darker, wilder love, but love all the same.

And now, as I find myself standing at the edge of a cliff; a king without a kingdom, in a world shaken and terrified for the future, I have you by my side. Manon Blackbeak; Crochan Queen, leader of the Thirteen, and my darling witchling.

Wherever those wyvern wings take us on this adventure, know this; I have spent my life looking for love, fighting for it, and being broken because of it, but no more. You have offered me something so powerful, so consuming, so intoxicating; it is iron and ice, darkest black and purest white…it is you and I.  


End file.
